The Penguin Book of English Song
Page 43
Come, as thou cam’st a thousand times,
A messenger from radiant climes,
And smile on thy new world, and be
As kind to others as to me.
Or, as thou never cam’st in sooth,
Come now, and let me dream it truth.
And part my hair, and kiss my brow,
And say – My love! why sufferest thou?
Come to me in my dreams, and then
By day I shall be well again.
For then the night will more than pay
The hopeless longing of the day.
from ‘Parting’
[Far, far from each other] (1906/1982)1
Far, far from each other
Our spirits have grown;
And what heart knows another?
Ah! who knows his own?
Blow, ye winds! lift me with you!
I come to the wild.
Fold closely, O Nature!
Thine arms round thy child.
Ah, calm me! restore me;
And dry up my tears
On thy high mountain-platforms,
Where morn first appears.
from ‘The river’
[My pent-up tears] (1906/1982)1
My pent-up tears oppress my brain,
My heart is swollen with love unsaid.
Ah, let me weep, and tell my pain,
And on thy shoulder rest my head!
Before I die – before the soul,
Which now is mine, must re-attain
Immunity from my control,
And wander round the world again;
Before this teased o’erlaboured heart
For ever leaves its vain employ,
Dead to its deep habitual smart,
And dead to hopes of future joy.
from The New Sirens
[Strew no more roses] (1913/1917)1
Strew no more red roses, maidens,
Leave the lilies in their dew –
Pluck, pluck cypress, O pale maidens
Dusk, oh, dusk the hall with yew!
– Shall I seek, that I may scorn her,
Her I loved at eventide?
Shall I ask, what faded mourner
Stands, at daybreak, weeping by my side?
Pluck, pluck cypress, O pale maidens!
Dusk the hall with yew!
CHARLES IVES
West London (1921)1
Crouched on the pavement, close by Belgrave Square,
A tramp I saw, ill, moody, and tongue-tied.
A babe was in her arms, and at her side
A girl; their clothes were rags, their feet were bare.
Some labouring men, whose work lay somewhere there,
Passed opposite; she touched her girl, who hied
Across, and begged, and came back satisfied.
The rich she had let pass with frozen stare.
Thought I: ‘Above her state this spirit towers;
She will not ask of aliens, but of friends,
Of sharers in a common human fate.
‘She turns from that cold succour, which attends
The unknown little from the unknowing great,
And points us to a better time than ours.’
SAMUEL BARBER
Dover beach
for voice and string quartet (1930–31)1
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the Straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles2 long ago
Heard it on the Ægæan, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.3
WILLIAM ALLINGHAM
(1824–89)
He sang Ballyshannon and not Ireland […] To feel the entire fascination of his poetry, it is perhaps necessary to have spent one’s childhood […] in one of those little seaboard Connaught towns.
W. B. YEATS: in The Poets and the Poetry of the Century, ed. Alfred H. Miles (1892)
Allingham was born in Ballyshannon, Co. Donegal, and his mother died when he was nine. His father, having run a small shipping business, ferrying timber and slate between Canada and the Baltic, and occasionally carrying Irish emigrants to America, later became a bank manager. William worked as a customs officer in Ireland and in England, where he finally settled in Lymington, Hampshire, in 1863. During his frequent visits to London he formed friendships with Carlyle, Patmore, Rossetti and Tennyson, all of whom feature prominently in his Diary, published posthumously in 1907. Rossetti’s letters to Allingham were edited by Birkbeck Hill in 1897. His first volume of verse, Poems (1850), contained ‘The fairies’ (1849) but sold only forty-three copies; Day and Night Songs appeared in 1854, with illustrations by his Pre-Raphaelite friends, Rossetti, Millais and Arthur Hughes. Having written his penetrating essay on ‘Irish Ballad Singers and Irish Street Ballads’ in 1851, he tried his own hand at the genre with great success. His finest achievement, Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland, was published in book form in 1864 – a long poem about a progressive young landlord that deals with oppression, injustice and class antagonism. This huge work – almost 5,000 lines – was quoted by Gladstone in the House of Commons, and earned Allingham a Civil List pension of £60 per annum. Fifty Modern Poems appeared in 1865 and Rambles by Patricius Walker, an account of his travels, in 1873. Having married the water-colourist Helen Paterson, who was twenty-four years his junior, he settled in Chelsea, where, in 1877, he published Songs, Ballads and Stories, which gathered together the best of his shorter verse. His Civil List pension was raised to £100 and he moved to Hampstead, where, after a fall from his horse, he died on 18 November 1889. Letters from W. Allingham to E. B. Browning were published in 1914.
ARNOLD BAX: from Six Songs
The fairies (1905/1907)1
To ‘Little Bridget’
Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren’t go a-hunting
For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
And white owl’s feather!
Down along the rocky shore
Some make their home,
They live on crispy pancakes
Of yellow tide-foam;
Some in the reeds
Of the black mountain lake,
With frogs for their watch-dogs
All night a
wake.
High on the hill-top
The old King sits;
He is now so old and gray
He’s nigh lost his wits.
With a bridge of white mist
Columbkill2 he crosses,
On his stately journeys
From Slieveleague to Rosses3;
Or going up with music
On cold starry nights,
To sup with the Queen
Of the gay Northern Lights.
They stole little Bridget
For seven years long;
When she came down again
Her friends were all gone.
They took her lightly back,
Between the night and morrow,
They thought that she was fast asleep,
But she was dead with sorrow.
They have kept her ever since
Deep within the lake,
On a bed of flag-leaves,
Watching till she wake.
By the craggy hill-side,
Through the mosses bare,
They have planted thorn-trees
For pleasure here and there.
Is any man so daring
As dig them up in spite,
He shall find their sharpest thorns
In his bed at night.
Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren’t go a-hunting
For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
And white owl’s feather!
(van Dieren, Foulds, Shaw)
WILLIAM WHITING
(1825–78)
The storm. The rain begins, followed by lightning, thunder and crashing waves. The wind howls through the rigging and the animals panic. Above the tumult rises the hymn Eternal Father, sung by Noye and all the others in the Ark.
Stage direction from Britten’s Noye’s Fludde (1957)
Having attended the Winchester Training Institution, Whiting, the son of a London grocer, was appointed the first master of the Quiristers at Winchester College, where he continued to teach for the next thirty-six years. He allegedly wrote ‘Eternal Father, strong to save’, which has become the sailors’ hymn throughout the world, when one of the Quiristers was about to sail for America. In 1860 he submitted a version of the poem for entry in the new Hymns Ancient and Modern, which the compilers revised before including it in the first edition. Whiting revised the poem in 1869, and it is this version that we print here. When Winston Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt met secretly in the North Atlantic at the height of the Second World War, Churchill chose the hymn to be sung at Divisions on board the HMS Prince of Wales; and it was frequently heard during the Falklands War of 1982. It is performed to memorable effect by Noye, Mrs Noye, the Children and Animals in Benjamin Britten’s Noye’s Fludde; and it was sung at the funerals of at least two American presidents: Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.
JOHN BACCHUS DYKES
For those at sea (Melita1) (1861)
Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm doth bind the restless wave,
Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limit keep:
Oh hear us, when we cry to thee,
For those in peril on the sea.
O Saviour, whose almighty word
The winds and waves submissive heard,
Who walkedst on the foaming deep
And calm amidst its rage didst sleep;
Oh hear us, when we cry to thee,
For those in peril on the sea.
O sacred Spirit, who didst brood
Upon the chaos dark and rude,
Who bad’st its angry tumult cease
And gavest light and life and peace:
Oh hear us, when we cry to thee,
For those in peril on the sea.
O Trinity of love and power,
Our brethren shield in danger’s hour,
From rock and tempest, fire and foe,
Protect them wheresoe’er they go:
And ever let there rise to thee
Glad hymns of praise from land and sea.
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
(1828–82)
Few brothers were more constantly together, or shared one another’s feelings and thoughts more intimately, in childhood, boyhood, and well on into mature manhood, than Dante Gabriel and myself. […] He was always and essentially of a dominant turn, in intellect and in temperament a leader. He was impetuous and vehement, and necessarily, therefore, impatient; easily angered, easily appeased, although the embittered feelings of his later years obscured this amiable quality to some extent; constant and helpful as a friend where he perceived constancy to be reciprocated; free-handed and heedless of expenditure, whether for himself or for others; in family affection warm and equable, and (except in relation to our mother, for whom he had a fondling love) not demonstrative. Never on stilts in matters of the intellect or of aspiration, but steeped in the sense of beauty, and loving, if not always practising, the good; keenly alive also (though many people seem to discredit this now) to the laughable as well as the grave or solemn side of things; superstitious in grain, and anti-scientific to the marrow. Throughout his youth and early manhood I considered him to be markedly free from vanity, though certainly well equipped in pride; the distinction between these two tendencies was less definite in his closing years. Extremely natural and therefore totally unaffected in tone and manner, with the naturalism characteristic of Italian blood; good-natured and hearty, without being complaisant or accommodating; reserved at times, yet not haughty; desultory enough in youth, diligent and persistent in maturity; self-centred always, and brushing aside whatever traversed his purpose or his bent.
WILLIAM M. ROSSETTI: Preface to The Poetical Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1891)
Painter, writer and translator, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was described by John Ruskin as the most important and original artistic force in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. He was the older brother of Christina Rossetti, and son of an Italian patriot who came to England in 1824 as a political exile. Though Dante Gabriel was educated at King’s College School, London, Italian was spoken at home; from 1843 to 1846 he attended Carey’s Art Academy in Bloomsbury Street, later became a pupil of Ford Madox Brown, and grew closely acquainted with Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, which led in the autumn of 1848 to the formation of the ‘Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’, a group of artists, poets and critics, whose aim was to bring about a revolution in English painting and poetry – fidelity to nature (bright colours, meticulous observation of flora), a rejection of the ‘grand style’ of Sir Joshua Reynolds, a high moral seriousness, and a revolt against the ugliness of modern life and dress were some of the PRB’s concerns. The Germ, the periodical they launched in 1850, gave voice to their ideals. Symbolism and the love of exotic romantic subject matter were characteristics of the movement, which lasted no more than six years. Rossetti, better known in his earlier years as a painter, turned increasingly to poetry, especially when in 1850 he met Elizabeth Siddal (Lizzie), whose painting and poetry he encouraged, and who modelled for many of the circle’s painters (the drowned Ophelia in Millais’s painting, for example, and Rossetti’s own wonderful pen and brown and black ink drawing in the Ashmolean). They married in 1860, she gave birth to a still-born child, and eventually died in 1862 from an overdose of laudanum. Though Rossetti had been unfaithful to her throughout their long relationship, he was deeply affected by her death, and buried with her the manuscripts of several poems that she had inspired.
In 1868 he renewed his acquaintance with Jane Morris, William Morris’s wife, whom, as Jane Burden, he had met in Oxford, where he, Burne-Jones, Morris and Arthur Hughes had been commissioned to undertake some decorations for the Oxford Union. She now inspired many of his sonnets, including the ‘Willowwood’ sequence, first published in March 1869 in The Fortni
ghtly Review, which Vaughan Williams set as ‘Willow-Wood’, a cantata for medium voice, in 1902–3. Jane Morris, however, was not his only muse: he arranged for the poems he had buried with Lizzie to be exhumed, and both women continued to inspire his poetry. Poems, published in 1870, included the first part of The House of Life. The following year Rossetti and William Morris lived together at Kelmscott Manor, where the latter seemed to approve of Rossetti’s ongoing relationship with Jane. She continued to model for him and inspire more sonnets for The House of Life, which were attacked by Robert Buchanan in a scurrilous pamphlet, ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’ (‘Nuptial Sleep’ was held to be obscene and did not appear in the 1881 edition), to which Rossetti replied in ‘The Stealthy School of Criticism’, which appeared in the December 1872 issue of The Athenæum. Ill-health, above all his devotion to chloral, and increasing paranoia, dogged his final years, though he continued to paint and write, and earned the admiration of Oscar Wilde. Ballads and Sonnets were published in 1881, and contained forty-seven new sonnets, thus bringing the final number to 101.
Rossetti’s poems have inspired a considerable number of songs, most notably by Bantock, Bax, Burrows, Farrar, Hart, Head, Ireland, Kelly, Orr, C. Scott, Somervell, Wood and, of course, Claude Debussy, who set ‘The blessed damozel’ during 1887 and 1888 in a translation by Gabriel Sarrazin.
RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS: The House of Life (c.1903/1904)
Lovesight
When do I see thee most, beloved one?
When in the light the spirits of mine eyes
Before thy face, their altar, solemnize
The worship of that Love through thee made known?
Or when in the dusk hours, (we two alone,)
Close-kissed and eloquent of still replies
Thy twilight-hidden glimmering visage lies,